Stephen Pearson has been missing for nearly 25 years, vanishing one day after he told a local postmaster he had mistakenly signed for a package containing 10-15 pounds of marijuana and delivered it to a neighbor’s house.
Ten days later, his station wagon was found abandoned in a wooded area in a scene that investigators believed was staged. Authorities focused on two neighbors suspected of dealing large quantities of marijuana, but one refused to cooperate, and another took a polygraph that came back inconclusive. The case has long gone cold.
“It’s the opinion of (Mobile County) Sheriff (Paul) Burch and myself that a homicide has been committed,” said Mobile County Commissioner Randell Dueitt, a former investigator with the Sheriff’s Department. “You have to keep in mind, a person is still at large. If you’re capable of committing one homicide, I’m under the impression you are capable of committing another.”
On Monday, the commission approved $3,750 for a billboard in Grand Bay, where Pearson, then 53, first went missing on Dec. 28, 2000. It will be displayed for a year in hopes of generating new leads.
Billboard partnership
The project marks the first partnership between Mobile-based nonprofit Alabama Cold Case Advocacy and a government body. The Sheriff’s Department, which has long investigated the case as a homicide, also supports the effort.
“This is the first time we’ve had someone actually sponsor a billboard for as long as we need it,” said Keri New, co-founder and president of Alabama Cold Case Advocacy, which launched on social media in 2022 and gained nonprofit status in 2023.
Mobile County Commission Randall Dueitt at the Monday, Feb. 24, 2025, commission meeting at Government Plaza in downtown Mobile, Ala.John Sharp
“We hope this is the first of many,” Dueitt added. “Anytime you can put new eyes on a case, you never know. No matter how big or small, if you have information, please call the sheriff’s office.”
New hopes the billboard campaign will generate leads in the Pearson case and inspire similar efforts across Alabama.
The group, which operates on a shoestring budget, had relied only on digital billboard advertisement. The digital advertisement was donated to the advocacy group, and those previous efforts included alerts that lasted for only two weeks. Most of the billboards were nowhere near the scene of the original crime.
The Pearson billboard will be located a few miles from where he went missing.
“We believe that any effort to keep cold cases in the public eye is valuable and may generate new leads,” Burch said, expressing appreciation for the commission’s financial support. “The Mobile County Sheriff’s Office will continue to work diligently to bring closure to the Pearson family and all families of cold case victims.”
Future legislation
The billboard effort is only the beginning of what the cold case group is hoping to do. Chief among their priorities is addressing a discrepancy between data kept within a missing persons database by the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) versus those maintained by the federal government.
New said the difference is about 70 cases – 230 cases in the state data compared to 292 Alabama cases tracked by the FBI.
A change.org petition, signed by 3,121 people, is also calling for reviews of cold cases every four years through a newly established Independent Review Board. The board will then be charged with determining whether the case should be reinvestigated, and by whom.
New said that legislation is not likely to surface this spring. But she said her organization is teaming with other groups like the non-profit Victims of Crime and Leniency (VOCAL) and CrimeStoppers, to help craft legislation that ensures cold cases are reviewed on a regular basis in Alabama.
“Right now,” said New. “They are not.”
The state legislative considerations come after President Joe Biden, in 2022, signed a bipartisan cold case investigation bill that establishes a requirement for federal law enforcement agencies to review unsolved murder cases.
The federal Homicide Victims’ Families Rights Act gives family members of cold case victims a way to officially request federal investigators review their case with the latest available technology, prohibits previous investigators from leading renewed probes, and instructs agencies to keep families updated on the case.
The law’s emergence comes amid some staggering statistics of over 250,000 unsolved murder cases in the U.S., a number that increases by 6,000 every year. Statistics show 4 in 10 murder victims’ families do not receive closure in their loved ones’ cases.
New clarified that the federal law only applies to federal homicides.
“We took that and used it as a guidepost to tailor something that includes suspicious death cases and homicides (investigated by Alabama state and local agencies),” New said.
Some states are taking action. In 2023, Georgia lawmakers passed the Coleman-Baker Act, modeled after the federal law.
The Georgia state law gives crime victims’ families the ability to look at case files if six years have passed, and forces lawmakers to reinvestigate a case if families call for it. It also provided for $5.4 million to set up a unit dedicated toward investigating cold-case homicides within the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
In Illinois, lawmakers pitched the Homicide Victims’ Families’ Rights Act in 2023. That bill, which did not pass through the Legislature, would have provided families the option of a review of first- or second-degree murder cases that had not been resolved after three years
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